Jackie French's Pennies For Hitler wins young people prize at NSW premier's history award

A heartfelt letter from a disabled boy to author Jackie French about the nature of good and evil has helped win French the Young People's History Prize at this year's NSW Premier's History Awards for a story that deals with the complicity of children in Nazi Germany.

After reading French's first book on the fraught topic, Hitler's Daughter, the boy was moved to write his first note, observing: "I have learnt to be wary of anyone who makes you angry".

Jackie French on her Araluen Valley property.Credit:Tim Bauer

French says: "I had been wondering how did Hitler do it. How did he get people to believe that people because of their race and religion should be exterminated? And a 14-year-old boy gave me the answer. Anger is contagious."

It was the starting point for Pennies For Hitler, the companion book to Hitler's Daughter, which tells the story of Georg, a German boy who, in a single day, sees his father murdered by Nazis and discovers hidden Jewish ancestry. Escaping Germany for Blitz-time London, he is evacuated to a foster family in NSW.

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Pennies for Hitler, by Jackie French, won the Young People's History Prize in the 2013 NSW Premier's History Awards.

Through the eyes of Georg, the novel shows how hatred and prejudice can corrupt society, but also demonstrates the healing power and consolation of kindness.

The conflicting experience of war is demonstrated too in Janet Butler's Kitty's War: The Remarkable Wartime Experiences of Kit McNaughton, which received the top honour, the Australian History Prize.

In the general history category, Saliha Belmessous won for Assimilation and Empire: Uniformity in the French and British Colonies, 1541-1954. The NSW Community and Regional History Prize went to Patti Miller for The Mind of a Thief. First Footprints, which appeared on ABC TV, was awarded the Multimedia History prize.

Judges described Kitty's War as a "brilliant study of the heroism and tragedy that marked a war so terrifying that even a woman as brave as Kit McNaughton could not bring herself to fully record it".

Kitty's War by Janet Butler won the Australian History Prize in the 2013 NSW Premier's History Awards.

The author says the book grew out of a visit to the war memorial in her rural home town.

"At the bottom of the list, out of alphabetical order, were the names of two nurses. The question of why the soldiers on the monument went to war, and what their going means for us as a nation concern us still.

"But what I wanted to know was what her going had meant to Kit. I wondered what had happened to her, how it had affected her, and what it had been like to come home to our quiet district afterwards."

Butler traced Kit's family and discovered the nurse had kept a diary for four years during World War I.

Through the diaries, and other official and private accounts, Butler uncovered overlooked aspects of Australia's war experience.

Kitty died in 1953 at the age of 69. "On the day of her funeral, her lifelong friend and companion at war, Ida Mockridge, inserted a notice in the paper," says Butler. "It read 'A tribute to Kitty, nee McNaughton, ex AIF'.

"In the last analysis, this is what Kitty's War is: a tribute to Kit and her fellow nurses of the first AIF. She would be very chuffed about the award."

French says the power of history is to teach compassion: "I can't promise the kids a perfect world when they leave school, but if they have the courage to think, 'yes, I can change the world', if they follow their passions and stand up for what is right, the one thing they will never be is bored – and the one thing history can teach them is that they can help change the world."